How Tall Were Our Historical Heroes?

This past week, I watched an interesting show on National Geographic Channel about one married couple’s attempts to authenticate an old tintype photograph they’d bought which they believed to depict Billy The Kid and a few of the Regulators playing, of all things, croquet. Perhaps you’ve heard stories about this “new discovery” (a few years old now)—or even watched the show. I won’t take the time to rehash the details in the 2-hour episode. Nor is my intent to debate whether the photograph truly doesdepict these famous figures out of Old West lore. There is debate about the validity of the claim. So if you’d like to read a detailed account of whether this photograph truly is “the real McCoy” in Billy The Kid memorabilia, please look at the thorough article done by True West Magazine. 

Old Tintype photograph that is rumored to depict Billy The Kid
and several of the Regulators

I found many of the details presented in the show to be a fascinating view into how one goes about authenticating antiques and other memorabilia. One such detail was how the facial recognition specialist hired to compare the new image to the only known one of William Bonney, then used the croquet mallet held by the supposed “Billy” to figure the man’s height. (Just a note, in the above-referenced article, they poke holes in the specialist’s assertion that there was a standard length for croquet mallets in that time period, so his math could be wrong). But, regardless, I found it interesting to see them estimate the supposed “Billy” figure’s height to be 5’8” tall, which, lo and behold, is the height recorded for the real Billy The Kid in history.

Close-up of the "Billy" figure, holding a
croquet mallet.

Hmmm. Billy The Kid was just 5’8”? He wasn’t much taller than me. Certainly not a very imposing figure for such a notorious outlaw. This got me to wondering about other historic figures and how tall they were. As is often the case, when I get curious, you get to benefit from my questions.

So how tall were the people from our past?

The general who led us through the Revolutionary War and who later become the first President of the United States, George Washington, stood at 6’2” tall. His wife, Martha, was a mere 5’ tall.

Martha and George Washington

Our 16^thPresident, Abraham Lincoln, was the tallest of our nation’s leaders, topping the height scale at 6’4” tall. His wife Mary Todd Lincoln, was another slight-of-stature woman at 5’2”.

Mary Todd Lincoln and President Abraham Lincoln

Interestingly, our shortest president was the fourth, James Madison, who stood only 5’4” tall, but was “dwarfed” by his above-average wife, Dolley, who stood 5’7” tall.

President James Madison and his tall wife Dolley.

General Robert E. Lee, who led the Confederate Army during the Civil War, stood 5’8” tall.

General Robert E. Lee

General Ulysses S. Grant, who led the Union forces in the same war—then went on to become our 18^thpresident—also topped out at 5’8”. 

General Ulysses S. Grant

Famed Old West lawman Wyatt Earp stood 6’ tall.

Lawman Wyatt Earp

Wild Bill Hickok, who worked many jobs in the Old West, including soldier, spy, wagon master, lawman, gunfighter, and actor, among other things, had a height of 6’ even.

Wild Bill Hickok

Martha Jane Canary, better known as Calamity Jane, doesn’t have a recorded height that I could find, but she was tall for a woman, strong like a man, and quite a character in every sense of the word.

Martha Jane Canary, also known as
Calamity Jane

Western sharpshooter, Annie Oakley, was all of 5’ tall.

Annie Oakley, famed sharshooter

What about more recent historical figures?

Longest-serving president Franklin D. Roosevelt, who presided over the country when Pearl Harbor was attacked, stood 6’2” tall, though few got to see his impressive height. He was stricken with polio, rendering him paralyzed from the waist down. He served as president from a wheelchair, the only disabled president of our country.

President Franklin D Roosevelt

Former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill during the second World War was a mere 5’6”.

Winston Churchill

I found conflicting reports on Adolf Hitler, the leader of the Nazis during World War II, which said he was 5’8 or 5’9”.

Adolf Hitler

Five-star general Douglas MacArthur, who played a major role in the Pacific theater of World War II, was 6’ tall. Emperor Hirohito, who was leader of Japan during the Occupation of Japan, stood 5’5”.

General Douglas MacArthur standing next to
Japanese Emperor Hirohito

And since our current president, Donald Trump, and his wife Melania, just visited England and met with the Queen, I thought I’d look up their respective heights. Donald Trump is 6’3”. Melania is 5’11”. And Queen Elizabeth of England is 5’4” tall. I found the photos taken during that visit to be cute. (Due to copyright laws, I can’t repost, but you can see them here).

It’s Your Turn:

Do you enjoy knowing the heights of historical figures? Why or why not?

Jennifer Uhlarikdiscovered the western genre as a pre-teen when she swiped the only “horse” book she found on her older brother’s bookshelf. A new love was born. Across the next ten years, she devoured Louis L’Amour westerns and fell in love with the genre. In college at the University of Tampa, she began penning her own story of the Old West. Armed with a B.A. in writing, she has finaled and won in numerous writing competitions, and been on the ECPA best-seller list numerous times. In addition to writing, she has held jobs as a private business owner, a schoolteacher, a marketing director, and her favorite—a full-time homemaker. Jennifer is active in American Christian Fiction Writers and lifetime member of the Florida Writers Association. She lives near Tampa, Florida, with her husband, college-aged son, and four fur children.

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Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Theologian, Conspirator, Spy.

These are four words you wouldn't expect to find in the same epitaph. But the author of The Cost of Discipleship was ready to lay down his life for his convictions. 

Seventy-five years ago next week, Pastor and Doctor of Theology Dietrich Bonhoeffer was arrested for his involvement in conspiracies to overthrow Hitler. He was hanged in a Nazi concentration camp on April 9, 1945, just two weeks before U.S. soldiers liberated it.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer--pastor, theologian, and brilliant man of letters--died
for his involvement in conspiracies to overthrow Hitler

"There are things for which an uncompromising stand is worthwhile."

"The only fight which is lost is that which we give up."

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Theologian.

The sixth child (and fourth son) of one of Berlin’s leading psychologists and neurologists, Dietrich surprised everyone when he announced at fourteen that he wished to become a theologian. The institution called “the church” had had very little part in his upbringing, although Christ certainly did. His mother, Paula, a granddaughter of noted theologian Karl von Hase, took responsibility for the religious education of her eight children. While the family did not attend church, their home life was filled with Bible reading, prayer, and hymns. Dietrich himself was such a gifted pianist that he aspired for a time to pursue it as a career.

No one quite knows what drove his decision about his calling, but his older brother Walter’s death in World War I had a profound impact on the family. Dietrich and his twin sister, Sabine, were twelve at the time. Sabine remembered long talks speculating about eternal life and the nature of death.

Wunderkind Dietrich was only twenty-one when he received his Doctor of Theology degree summa cum laude from Berlin University—too young to be ordained. At twenty-four he accepted a teaching fellowship at New York City's Union Theological Seminary. He was unimpressed with the seminary (“One [subject] is never handled,… the gospel of Jesus Christ, of the cross, of sin and forgiveness…”). But he did experience something during his year in the United States that left a life-long impression. Fellow seminarian Frank Fisher introduced him to the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, where Dietrich taught Sunday school and a women’s Bible study. "Here one can truly speak and hear about sin and grace and the love of God...the Black Christ is preached with rapturous passion and vision," he said.

Bonhoeffer credited his experiences abroad with turning his faith “from phraseology to reality,” and with teaching him to see things "from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated.” (Fun fact: the classical pianist also became an avid fan of black spirituals during his Harlem stint.)

Pastor.

Dietrich returned to Germany in 1931 and was finally ordained at the age of 25. The Nazi ascension to power on January 30, 1933, put his convictions to immediate test. A scant two days later, Bonhoeffer was cut off the air in the middle of a radio address in which he sounded the alarm against an idolatrous cult of the Führer.

A battle for control of the German church ensued. Nazi sympathizers won key positions in the synods of the major denominations. In late 1933, Dietrich’s national church synod passed a resolution barring any pastors or church officials of Jewish descent. A rally of 20,000 members of the so-called Deutsche Christen movement demanded the removal of the Old Testament from the Bible.

Bonhoeffer helped establish an organization called the “Pastors’ Emergency League,” which fought these moves—but the church’s bishops remained silent. In 1934, a successor group Bonhoeffer also helped found affirmed a confession that included this language.

“We repudiate the false teaching that there are areas of our life in which we belong not to Jesus Christ, but to other lords…”

Shockingly, only about 20% of German pastors supported this move.

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.” 

- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, April 1933. 

Dietrich briefly took a pastoral post in London in protest, but felt the Lord calling him back to the fight in Germany in 1935. He organized an underground seminary. In August 1937, Himmler shut it down and 27 pastors and former students were arrested. Bonhoeffer spent the next two years traveling to encourage his students who were pastoring illegally in villages. During that time he wrote his best-known book, The Cost of Discipleship, as well as Life Together.

"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance....
Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.”

"Costly grace… is costly because it costs a man his life, and it is grace because it gives a man the only true life." 

- The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

Bonhoeffer with a confirmation class in 1932.
The boys were from "about the worst area of Berlin."
Bonhoeffer moved there to have more impact on them.
(Photo attribution)

Spy.

Barred from teaching in 1936. Banned from Berlin and forbidden to speak in public, to print or to publish in 1940. Things took an even more serious turn when Bonhoeffer’s brother-in-law, Hans von Dohnányi, recruited him into the Abwehr. The Abwehr, a military intelligence agency established in 1921, was actually the center of the German military resistance to Hitler. Bonhoeffer began work as a double agent, using his Abwehr role as a cover while he served as a liaison for the German resistance.

Conspirator.

Through his Abwehr connections, Dietrich learned the full scale of Nazi atrocities. He took an active role in “Operation 7,” which smuggled German Jews to Switzerland and was responsible for two attempts on Hitler’s life. The noted pacifist didn't come to the point of conspiring on a man's life without torment of soul. But he concluded Hitler was like a man “driving a car into a group of innocent bystanders.” (Prescient...) A person like that had to be stopped. 

Nazi suspicions were aroused. They arrested Bonhoeffer on vague charges, including "conspiring to rescue Jews," and held him for eighteen months in a spartan six-by-nine-foot cell. He kept busy with outreach to everyone he encountered and with a vigorous smuggled correspondence (Letters and Papers from Prison).

"The kingdom is to be in the midst of your enemies. And he who will not suffer this does not want to be of the Kingdom of Christ."

- Martin Luther, quoted by Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Life Together

In September 1944, Abwehr documents were discovered that linked him to the failed 20 July Plot on Hitler's life. On April 9, 1945, Nazis marched him naked onto the execution ground of Flossenbürg concentration camp and hanged him, along with six co-conspirators. His brother Klaus and brothers-in-law Rüdiger Schleicher and Hans von Dohnányi also paid with their lives for their involvement.

“When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

- The Cost of Discipleship, 1937

Powerful words. The conviction with which Dietrich Bonhoeffer lived them was even more so.

I stepped away from a marketing career that spanned continents to write what I love: stories of reckless faith that showcase God's hand in history. I'm so excited that my debut novel, The Plum Blooms in Winter, will launch this October from Mountain Brook Ink! Inspired by a remarkable true story from World War II's pivotal Doolittle Raid, The Plum Blooms in Winter is an American Christian Fiction Writers' Genesis Contest winner. The novel follows a captured American pilot and a bereaved Japanese prostitute who targets him for ritual revenge. For updates and related goodies, I'd like to warmly invite you to subscribe to my newsletter HERE. Please also feel free to check out my blog, Five Stones and a Sling, which hovers in the region where history meets Bible prophecy meets current events. It's rich ground--we live in a day when prophecies are leaping from the Bible's pages into the headlines!

I live outside Phoenix with my husband, a third-generation airline pilot who doubles as my Chief Military Research Officer. We share our home with two all-grown-up kids and a small platoon of housecats.

What you didn't know about Adolf Hitler plus giveaway!

Be sure to read on down to find out how to be entered to win Sword of Forgiveness.

While doing research for a novella I ran across some shocking information. I hesitate to say interesting because of the subject. But let me digress for a moment. My grandfather had several books from World War II that had vivid pictures of carnage left behind by Adolf Hitler and his followers. Even as a child it made me sad and I knew how wrong it was although it was published in a book on war. I somehow knew that this went beyond war when I saw the bodies of women, elderly, and children piled on top of each other as they fled a building and were murdered. (Honestly, I don't know why they let me look at that book. Some of those pictures are etched in my memory 40 some years later.)  I've not been able to write WWII novels because of those memories. I can't seem to move past them to find a story. So what does all this have to do with my research? I was looking up when animal rights came into being and I stumbled across a couple articles. 

A 2013 article from The Huffington Post told of 95 year Margot Woelk, a taste tester for Adolf Hitler. Her job (not volunteer but was forced) was to make sure the food hadn't been poisoned. She had to taste the food an hour before it was driven to Nazi headquarters, The Wolf's Lair. She tells how it was an all vegetarian diet with lots of fresh vegetables, rice, and salads. He may not have always been a vegetarian but later in life it does seem to lend to that idea. That alone is not shocking but couple that with the fact that Adolf Hitler supported animal rights while murdering innocent people it becomes almost unbelievable.

November 24, 1933 Adolf Hitler signed the Cruelty to Animals law. The law forbade the unnecessary torment or rough handling of animals among many other laws. Laws such as not allowing to dock horse's tails and going as far as not allowing horses with docked tails into their country. And on that same document he limits tail and ear docking of dogs without anesthesia. Now don't get me wrong, I actually agree with most of his Cruelty to Animal laws. I love my animals. I own horses, miniature donkey, dogs, cat, and would never dream of neglecting them or being cruel to them. They're like family and I think all God's creatures should be treated with kindness! I'm against anything that harms animals. But it shocked me that a man who murdered so many people, children included, would sign into law something that protected animals. 

More of the laws he signed into being were forbidding of neglecting animals, to put an animal out, as in to get rid of it was against the new law, to use

Force feeding a goose
By L214 - Éthique & animaux, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3537225

fragile, 














ill, or overworked animals was now punishable, and the list continues on. His law covers experimentation on animals in so much as to make sure they suffer no pain and goes into such detail that there has to be a real purpose along with an obtainable goal. And even addressed geese, that they were not to be force fed. 

Punishments were according to the crime committed against the animal. Punishments were imprisonment or/and a fine.

When I ran across this information it brought back to memory the pictures I saw in those books of my grandfathers. The tests that Hitler ran which left people maimed, the pain he caused them, the forced labor from men and women who were no more than skin on bones, the terror he inflicted on people as he marched them to their deaths and I wondered how a man who did such things could sign into law a paper with so much detail about how to treat animals and not have consideration for human life.

If you'd like to see a copy of the Nazi Germany and all of the Animal Rights page click here. 

I'd love to hear what you have to say about this law. Had you heard about it before? I'm giving away a copy of Sword of Forgiveness so don't forget to leave your email address, too! If you share this on FB and twitter I'll give you extra entries. Just let me know. :o) Giveaway ends 11/14.

When her father died, she had promised herself no man would own her again, yet who could defy an edict of the king? After the death of her cruel father, Brithwin is determined never again to live under the harsh rule of any man. Independent and resourceful, she longs to be left alone to manage her father’s estate. But she soon discovers a woman has few choices when the king decrees she is to marry Royce, the Lord of Rosencraig. As if the unwelcome marriage isn’t enough, her new husband accuses her of murdering his family, and she is faced with a challenge of either proving her innocence or facing possible execution.
Royce Warwick returns home after setting down a rebellion to find his family brutally murdered. When all fingers point to his betrothed and attempts are made on his life, Royce must wade through murky waters to uncover the truth. Yet Brithwin’s wise and kind nature begin to break down the walls of his heart, and he soon finds himself in a race to discover who is behind the evil plot before Brithwin is the next victim.

Debbie Lynne Costello has enjoyed writing stories since she was about eight years

old. She studied journalism at Heritage University. She raised her family and then embarked on her own career of writing the stories that had been begging to be told. She and her husband have four children and live in upstate South Carolina. She has worked in many capacities in her church and is currently the Children's Director. Debbie Lynne has shown and raised Shetland Sheepdogs for eighteen years and still enjoys litters now and then. In their spare time, she and her husband take pleasure in camping and riding their Arabian and Tennessee Walking horses.

Photos from Wikipedia